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// ACUMEN

RISK

Why Does Your Project Need Risk Management?Accurate project scheduling and realistic cost forecasting can be the difference between being a project hero and being responsible for project failure.

The quality of your schedule is only as good as the information you put into it. Scheduling tools such as Primavera and Microsoft Project provide a great framework for building project plans and schedules and schedule diagnostic tools such as Acumen Fuse® ensure these schedules are sound. While these tools give you a great foundation, you are still making the strong assumption that your scope is 100% accurate and that, regardless of what happens during execution, the project will finish on time.

In reality, projects don’t behave this way. Despite the best-laid plans, every project carries uncertainty and risk that all too often lead to cost and schedule overruns. As an industry, project management tends to be overly optimistic in its cost and schedule forecasting and this is largely due to inadequate consideration for known unknowns during the planning process.

Acumen Risk™ helps you effectively account for and proactively reduce risk exposure resulting in an accurate forecast you can rely on.//

Risk

Cloud

Fuse

360

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Project Risk Analysis with Acumen Risk

Simply maintaining a list of identified risks doesn’t give you insight into the true impact of risk on your project.

By determining the realism of activity durations in the schedule (uncertainty) and combining this with identified risk events (from the risk register), analysis can be executed to pinpoint not only where your biggest risk exposure lies but also when in your project it’s most likely to occur.

Establishing the cause of cost and schedule risk in your project gives you a roadmap for establishing a risk reduction plan (through mitigation) making your risk management effort a pro-active risk-reduction solution rather than an exercise in just shining the spotlight on bad news.

Acumen S1 // S5™ Schedule Maturity Framework

Today, hundreds of projects around the world have benefited from the Acumen S1 // S5 approach to risk management. By pursuing five levels of identified maturity, projects are able to establish schedules that are validated; have accounted for risk; have been optimized and mitigated in order to achieve a target and have team buy-in on the execution plan. Each level leads to a more successful and more achievable project plan.

S1 //Schedule Basis

Acumen Fuse®: Project DiagnosticsExport cleansed

schedule to Primavera or MS Project

SchedulePrimaveraMS ProjectOpen PlanAstaExcel/XLS

CostExcel/XLSDeltek CobraPrism G2

Risk RegisterExcel/XLSPertmaster/PRAARMPrimavera P6

Team InputsUncertaintiesRisk Event ScoringCost/Schedule Impacts

S2 //Critiqued

S3 //Risk-Adjusted

S4 //Optimized

S5 //Team Approved

Acumen Risk™: Risk Analysis & Register

Acumen 360™: Project OptimizationExport accelerated

schedule to Primavera or MS Project

Team validation and buy-in

ExportRisk Register

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Acumen Risk Overview

So what is Acumen Risk exactly? Acumen Risk is an integrated cost and schedule risk analysis tool that integrates a project team’s existing risk register into a highly accurate risk-adjusted forecast. Need to run a quick schedule risk analysis? Need to build a fully integrated cost/schedule risk model incorporating risk events and mitigation plans? No problem. Acumen Risk is designed to accommodate both ends of the spectrum.

On one hand, Acumen Risk is incredibly powerful, analyzing thousands of activities in seconds while accounting for scope uncertainty, work complexity, risk events and opportunities. On the other hand, it is user friendly eliminating the statistical and logical complexities of building risk models against large project schedules.

No More Statistical Expertise Needed

Legacy risk tools require statistical expertise. In practice, however, asking a project team to relate to statistical complexities such as minimum, most likely, maximum ranges along with complex distribution types results in these risk tools being ineffective at accurately capturing true risk and uncertainty values.

Acumen Risk introduces an innovative method for capturing risk and uncertainty. Uncertainty factors are defined and assigned across groups of activities, eliminating the need for arduous and manual risk loading of every single activity. Native project schedules can be used as the basis of the risk model regardless of size and complexity. Project risk registers can be incorporated quickly into the model and risks are mapped to one or more activities.

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Avoiding Garbage in Garbage out…

By adopting Acumen’s Uncertainty Factor™ approach, project teams can focus on collaborating on the true inputs into the risk model rather than getting bogged down in statistical “analysis-paralysis”.

The Uncertainty Factor approach makes risk loading schedules fast and repeatable across multiple projects bringing uniformity of scoring within an organization.

Acumen Risk makes risk loading large schedules easy. Simply assign risk and uncertainty at whatever level you want to report risk exposure and let the model do the rest. Concerned about losing detail? The Acumen Risk approach actually ensures the opposite: the model itself is highly detailed and results are rolled up to a meaningful level.

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Cost Risk Analysis (CRA), Schedule Risk Analysis (SRA) and Project Risk Register all in One!

Until now, generating a truly integrated cost/schedule risk model has been a complex task requiring the likes of resource-loaded schedules and creation of ‘cost activities’.

With Acumen Risk, those days are gone. Now, simply run your schedule risk analysis, and point the results to those cost elements that are impacted by schedule delay, and let Acumen Risk do the rest. The result: an accurate cost risk forecast that truly accounts for schedule risk exposure where relevant.

Whether you’ve already established a project risk register in an external tool, or you want to start from scratch, take advantage of the Acumen Risk risk register module. Track current state, and target or mitigated state as well as the steps needed to get there. Let Acumen Risk analyze the cost/benefit ratio and effectiveness of your proposed mitigation plan in order to make smarter, more informed decisions.

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What if… Scenarios

During early concept, leading up to project sanction or even during execution, risk analysis is an invaluable tool for generating alternate scenarios. At the click of a button, run what-if analysis, or generate alternate scenarios including

Mitigated vs. non mitigated,

Option A vs. Option B, or

Finding the two main network paths that carry the most risk driving out the completion date (e.g. facilities vs. pipeline)

Once generated, simply compare risk exposure for each scenario and make informed decisions about the best path forward. With Acumen Risk, risk analysis finally becomes a strategic component within your organization.

Intelligent Risk ReportsSome risk tools boast hundreds of risk reports, but few really give you the insight you’re looking for. Acumen Risk provides those reports that truly matter:

Team’s Perception of risk: Executive summary of how many activities were perceived as aggressive, realistic or conservative. A great way to determine the team’s schedule buy-in.

Risk Exposure: A next-generation risk distribution report—quickly determine risk ranges, contingency, risk-adjusted values such as P50 and P75 dates, costs and risk exposure reporting for any given activity or WBS grouping.

Risk Drivers: Pinpoint which activities, risk events and driving paths are the leading cause of your project’s cost and schedule risk exposure.

Risk Comparison: visually compare risk profiles across multiple scenarios including alternate mitigation strategies.

Acumen Risk Metrics: Take advantage of the numerous risk metrics built-into Acumen Fuse to further slice and dice your analysis.

Non-Critical Path poses greatest risk to project

completion

Critical Path doesn’t impact project completion

Project Completion

Low Risk

High Risk

Risk-adjusted Project Completion delayed by

non-critical path

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The Risk Contribution Factor™

Unique to Acumen Risk, the Risk Contribution Factor™ is a quantitative measure (cost and schedule) of how much impact activities and risk events have on any given milestone or group of activities.

Rather than looking at an ordered list of activities in a traditional tornado chart showing relative impact, quickly pinpoint true risk contribution. Find out if your project risk exposure is due to:

the knock-on effect of the sequence of activities (logic)

the duration uncertainty within certain activities, or

the impact of specific risk events.

Most importantly, Acumen Risk reports this in real cost and duration contribution.

Experience a New Way to Evaluate Project Risk with Acumen Risk

Straightforward analysis – Acumen Risk is user friendly with straightforward results and easy-to-understand visuals, helping you to truly understand your risk analysis.

Truly integrated cost and schedule risk – Cost risk exposure doesn’t occur in isolation of schedule risk. Acumen Risk provides an easy way to link schedule risk to cost risk so that you can determine the impact of schedule delays on your cost estimate.

Direct schedule integration – Acumen Risk works directly with the native scheduling tool eliminating the need to create separate high-level schedules.

Meaningful reports – Generate reports you can actually use. Acumen Risk includes all the reporting you need, automatically created in professional, ready-to-print format.

Project diagnostics – Acumen Risk includes the Acumen Fuse platform giving you access to all the project diagnostics, scenario generation, and schedule cleansing that comes with Fuse—a direct means of preparing your schedule for risk analysis in one tool.

Unrivaled performance – From input to reporting, Acumen Risk performs up to five times faster than current risk analysis software and includes access to the reliable updates and product support Acumen is known for.

Take the risk out of your next project.//